


it's not about deserve

by captainhandsome



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Everyone Needs A Hug, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Hurt Steve Rogers, Light Angst, M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Has A Heart, a lot of of pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-05 16:17:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16814110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainhandsome/pseuds/captainhandsome
Summary: Tony and Bucky were happy together, Steve wasn't going to come between that, regardless of his feelings towards both of them.Tony and Bucky deserve each other more than he does. So he leaves.But Bucky and Tony have feelings for him too[rating may change with further chapters]





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you enjoy!!
> 
> come say hi on [tumblr](https://nohalfway.tumblr.com)
> 
> -s

Steve was happy for them, he was, he was! He just… _no!_ He repriminded himself, he refused to even think about it. They were happy together, they loved each other and they deserved each other.

Both of them deserved love and peace, after Tony’s trainwreck of a relationship with Pepper and the endless betrayal and neglect from the people who ‘loved’ him and every damn thing Hydra forced into Bucky’s head, it made him irrationally angry but further proved to him how much they needed this and each other.

The last thing he was going to do was come between them, regardless of his feelings, he _can't_ and he _won’t_.

When Tony and Bucky eventually announced that they were dating it never really came to a surprise to anybody. They had been spending more and more time together in Tony's workshop - initially just fixing Bucky's arm and helping him maintain it but after a while they (begrudgingly) admitted they were friends and then a few months after that, a happy and proud announcement that they were dating.

During the time they were - courting? flirting? they never left Steve out, always taking him along to their pseudo-almost-dates. And even now they take and invite him to places with them, but he _can't_ , not when he has _feelings_ for them.

He's stopped going out with them as much now because Bucky or Tony make a comment, usually sexual, sometimes sweet, towards him and he can’t help but think that they know. But he also knows that they weren’t the type of people to make fun of him. He refused to let his feelings ruin this for them and if it was choosing between having them, but they weren't together because of him and him being out of the picture, but they were happy together, everytime, every _damn_ time, without a doubt, it would be the latter. They deserved each other more than he deserved them.

* * *

“Hey! Hey, Rogers! Where you going?” Tony yelled across the room to Steve who was putting his blue-common-room-sketchbook that was (previously) on the coffee table in his bag. He, in all they time Tony had known him, never left the tower with that particular book, on longer missions he took the maroon A5 one and all his black ones never left his room and he never let anybody look in them, the blue and maroon ones, anyone could, but never the black ones.

To say Tony noticed every minute detail about Steve was… fairly accurate. But so did Bucky, so, he wasn’t entirely alone.

“DC,” Steve replied, pulling Tony out of his thoughts. Steve zipped up his bag and slung it over his shoulder but not before Tony caught a flash of a corner of a black sketchbook.

“What!?” Tony said, distressed, “You can’t leave!”

“Who’s goin’ leavin’ where?” Bucky, not entirely awake, entered the room and gravitated towards Tony, hair messed up and shirt crinkled.

“Heya baby,” he greeted Tony with a kiss on his cheek and slipped and arm around his waist, holding back from touching Steve as well.

“Steve,” Tony started accusingly, leaning into Bucky’s side, “is abandoning us.” Bucky and Steve both huffed out a laugh at Tony’s dramatics, “I’m not leaving, I took the job Fury’s been tryna get me to do since 2012 in Shield HQ and I'm not going between DC and Manhattan everyday,” he explained.

“But you won’t be going there every day, right?” Tony tried to reason with him. Bucky hummed in agreement with Tony, tilting his head towards Steve.

He couldn’t leave, he and Bucky were _so close_ to asking Steve to be in a poly relationship with them, or at least up until recently when Steve started going out with them less and less.

Bucky had said that Steve was ridiculously dense and obtuse when it came to people romantically liking him and having feelings for him.

> “He doesn't think he deserves it, or that they’re lying to him, or that they just don't like him. Or he cant have them.” Bucky told him one night, when Tony, curled up in his arms, fingers trailing random patterns across tanned skin littered with scars, asked Bucky why Steve hadn't taken them up on any of the suggestive things they'd said. “It comes from being a little guy,” he continued.
> 
> “He's so ridiculously obtuse it's ridiculous,” Tony had mumbled sleepily, Bucky laughed, told him to go to sleep and that they would get Steve's head out of his ass eventually.

“Tony, Buck,” Steve said, his voice bordering dangerously into fond, he chastised himself, in his head, immediately after, coming close, way too close, to revealing his feelings, “I’ll either be there pretty much full time or overseas,” he hesitated, too many emotions flashed over his face, too fast for any of them to decipher, “I- I will miss you, though.” His voice was steady but he refused to meet their eyes, turning around quickly, hesitating again, but this time walking away.

Tony made to call out at his retreating back, but Bucky stopped him, turning to face him, and curling his hand behind his neck and the other staying on his waist. “Don’t, baby, he has to come to us and if this is what he wants, then...” he trailed off, unable to think of anything more.

Tony sighed, “I’m gonna miss him, a lot,” he buried his face in Bucky’s neck, arms wrapping around him and breathing him in.

“Yeah,” Bucky mumbled into his hair, “it’s gonna be a tough move.”

* * *

Steve stepped out onto the balcony if his old-current apartment, fumbling out a green zippo lighter and a pack of Lucky Strikes. He lit a cigarette and took what felt like his first breath since leaving Tony and Bucky.

 _“I will miss you,”_ he muttered on the exhale, smoke tumbling out of his lips. What an idiot, a complete and utter _fucking moron_. If they hadn’t known, they definitely knew now, he couldn’t’ve made it any more obvious if he’d tried. They were probably relieved he left.

They were to two most important people in his life, the only people in this century he’s ever, truly, loved. There have been other people, he was 97, not dead after all, but he never really loved them, only Tony and Bucky. But this, this distance and time apart was good, it was, Tony and Bucky could be with each other without him getting in the way.

And he could focus on his career.

His mind kept running through all the reasons why this was a good idea, despite how much it hurt to turn away, Fury had told him, way back in 2012, a few months after Loki, a few months before the team began living in the tower, when he’d let slip that he wasn’t doing much, apart from catching up with the times and going on missions, that the job he could give him was incredibly demanding, he wouldn’t have time for anything in way of a social life if he took it but he would actually be doing something.

He wanted to be doing something that wasn’t painful (external injuries, he could handle, but emotions would never be his forte).

He flicked the ash off and took in another drag, long and deep.

> He tilted his head back, felt the rain hitting his face, let his eyes go almost-closed and release the smoke, watching it curl around itself and disperse into the troposphere.
> 
> “They ever tell you those things cause cancer? Did they give you the The Fault In Our Stars in your ‘Welcome to the new century, pal’ care package?” Tony called out, across the roof to Steve and uncaring of the rain walked out to the edge and stood shoulder to shoulder with him, leaning against the railing. Steve smiled and tilted his head back down, he took a drag and said, “I got prescribed ‘em for the asthma in the 30s, and now there’s PSAs and billboards sayin’ it’ll kill you but…” He shrugged. Tony felt the drag of wet leather on slightly damp fabric against his shoulder.
> 
> It annoyed him less than he thought it would.
> 
> It suddenly dawned on Steve that Tony didn’t has superhuman regenerative properties and a third of his lungs weren’t a network of alveoli but an engineering marvel of glass and metal.
> 
> And that the PSAs were probably right about second-hand smoke.
> 
> “Shit, Tony, your lungs,” he hurriedly stomped out the cigarette and waved his hands about to dispel the smoke, “Tony, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t be around me right now, your lungs-”
> 
> “Steve, Steve,” Tony cut in, smiling softly at him, thinking about how a teammate he’s known (personally) for only a few months cared more about his health than Howard when he was a few months old, remembering how he always came into his nursery with a lit cigar filling the room with grey smoke.
> 
> “It’s fine, it’s fine, smoke if you want to, I came out to ask just, you know, how you’re doing, you seemed, quieter, even more subdued on this one ” he continued, he didn’t smoke anymore, not after Afghanistan and the arc reactor, but he remembered how relieving and relaxing it felt, although, he mused, for Steve it was probably all psychological now, remembering something he’d said about coffee last week, when they’d both run into each other at the Shield cafeteria.
> 
> Steve cocked his head to the side, and gave him a, confused look, as if, if this was the first time in a while someone’s asked him that.
> 
> _Please don’t let that be the first time in the 21st century that someone’s asked him, genuinely asked him how he’s doing,_ Tony thought.
> 
> Steve swallowed, looked at the ground and then met Tony’s eyes, he looked so, so vulnerable and trusting and, it took that second for Tony realise just how young Steve was, in that moment he was, biologically speaking, only in his 20s. Jesus.
> 
> “I’m, I’m doing ok Tony, how are you?”

Steve ground the spent cigarette under his heel and turned back to face his apartment, exactly as neat and tidy (and lonely, but he told that part of his mind to shut up, this was a good idea, he was sure of it) as he’d left it, save for a thin layer of dust, but he’d tidy later, right now, he had a meeting with Fury and his next mission.


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they miss each other, quite a bit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you enjoy!!
> 
> come say hi on [tumblr!](https://nohalfway.tumblr.com)
> 
> (nohalfway.tumblr.com)

God, he misses them.

It’s been two months of constant work and missions for SHIELD, weeks on end spent in the Himalayas or the Amazon or uncomfortably hot places that he can't pronounce, two months of file after file on bright screens and crinkled paper (because SHEILD were 201 clearance levels of paranoid), it was a constant, never-ending stream of missions and reports and training at a gruelling pace, just to come back to his apartment (he tried to call it home, he tried, but he couldn’t, and he definitely couldn't go _home_ ). But at least he didn't have any time to pine.

God he was pathetic, _Get it together Rogers._

And with that, he flicked off the lamp on his bedside table and tried to sleep.

* * *

He missed Steve

As much as in the year he was off doing the USO tour.

And it had only been two months, although he supposed it had something to do with recently realising that he’d fallen in love with the spitfire he met in first grade, sometime in the 19th century.

> “Why’ren’t you sittin’ with the other kids?” Bucky finally asked Steve, after weeks of noticing that he never sat with anyone at lunch, even though he was always nice to everybody, unless they were mean; last time Timmy called Bobby a ‘ _fairy’_ , Steve, despite being 2 years younger and a foot shorter, stood up to him, and told Bobby, after his visit to the nurse, that it was worth it to see another bully hurt.
> 
> The teachers thought that made him violent and impulsive.  
>  Bucky thought he was brave.
> 
> He also thought that the late-fall sun made his floppy blond hair look pretty, he wondered if it felt soft.  
>  It looked like it felt soft.
> 
> Steve’s sigh brought him out of his thoughts, “I can’t play games ‘cos i get sick a lot, an’ Ma said I gotta be careful, so they said there’s no point.”  
>  He said it like he’s repeated over and over and he’s resigned himself to a lifetime of lonely lunches. Bucky wanted to change that.
> 
> Bucky wanted to be his friend, he didn’t care that he couldn’t play games - the boys usually played war and Bucky didn’t really like it, he didn’t see the point. He told Steve as much.
> 
> Bucky also vowed to make him happy all the time from when his eyes lit up when he asked Steve if he wanted to be friends. 

“Bucky, baby, you ok?”

Tony’s voice never failed to make him smile. He turned his back on the window of their room to face him and gave Tony a slightly melancholy smile, “I just, miss him, a lot.” Tony crossed the room to him and wrapped his arms around his waist, leaning into his chest, “I know.” He huffed out a humourless laugh, “God, if you’d told me back in 2012 that I’d be missing Steve…”  
He smiled, a little sadly, “They ever tell you that we weren’t the best of friends until I almost blew myself up? A couple years before Steve crashed the old Shield and found you, god, I thought he was an asshole, self-righteous-”

> “ _-prick!_ You can not just tell me what to do and what to make and how to live my life, Rogers.” Tony slammed down the file on Steve’s coffee table after bursting into his apartment.
> 
> Steve shot up from his couch, snapping _Fahrenheit 451_ shut. “I-You-Tony! You can’t come here, you shouldn’t even know this place exists! Email me or something, you do know what that is right?”  
>  He knew he shouldn’t aggravate him but Tony had no right, whatsoever, to, firstly, stalk him, as he evidently had (just because he could doesn’t mean that he has to) and secondly just come to him ho-apartment.
> 
> They had told him that people aren't as friendly in this century, that people didn't talk to strangers anymore (that lead to a stranger danger lecture he didn't want to recount). But Steve didn't have much of a desire to talk to people anyway.
> 
> And he definitely hadn’t told anyone he was living in Brooklyn now, although, he wasn’t naïve, he was positive that SHEILD were tracking his payments and probably other things (he didn’t like to dwell on that too long), but at least they were respectful enough to recognise that he wanted privacy.
> 
> Unlike _Tony goddamn Stark_.
> 
> Were privacy and _basic fucking respect_ difficult concepts for him?
> 
> “Is personal freedom a difficult concept for you?” Tony barked back, glaring at him, “You are aware that the _‘Captain’_ in your fucking title is barely honorary, you have next to no experience in this century, a preschooler has more experience. You have no right to tell me what to do in a _battle for our lives_ -”
> 
> Steve’s jaw clicked, his eyes hardened and he stepped forward, almost nose-to-nose with him. “ _You,_ ” he seethed, almost growling, “have done nothing but what you want, regardless of any consequences whatsoever, to yourself or to others. I give you commands for your safety, the team’s safety and the civillian’s safety and the defeat of _who-fucking-ever_ , you disobeying that puts everyone at risk. We are a team, and as the person responsibl-”
> 
> “ _But you aren’t, Rogers!_ You fucking aren’t and you never will be. Just because you’re the ‘C.O’and we’re a ‘team’, don’t think for a damn second we’re ever going to be friends, the Avenegers aren’t your fucking Howlies. Wake up already.”
> 
> Steve rolled his eyes, _God, he really thought he knew everything, huh_.
> 
> “Oh, _fuck off_ , Stark, you think I don’t know that? I honestly couldn’t care less if you, Thor and Barton have a weekly orgy. But we have a duty to do-”
> 
> This time, it was Tony who growled, “Ah, right, the only reason you’re even fucking here-”
> 
> _“Get. Out.”_
> 
> He spoke through gritted teeth and in a low voice. “Get the fuck out right now.”
> 
> Tony swallowed, for the first time, in all the months he’d known Steve, he was terrified of him, his brain unhelpfully supplied the numbers and stats from his Dad’s Project: Rebirth files, about how much he could bench and throw and just how fast he could move.
> 
> It was probably best if he left.

Bucky carded a hand through Tony’s hair, comforting him, knowing that he regretted all the words he said, despite how much he had believed it at the time.  
“You were both assholes, still are, but at least you’re friends and assholes.” Tony snorted and tried to headbut Bucky, “You’re an asshole too. And I wanna be more than friends,” he mumbled into his shirt, the last half barely audible.

Bucky’s hand kept moving in his hair, a constant, soothing, moving motion, “I know, sugar, I know.”

They stayed in that position for a while, the sky melding from a pink-orange, the sun a semi-circle on the horizon to a dark blue, a crescent moon hanging in the sky, surrounded by stars they could barely see. 

* * *

Steve woke up when the moon was hanging high in the sky, a waxing crescent 

> He turned his head to face Tony, “What?”
> 
> “The moon, right now, about a quarter visible, just after the new moon. A waxing crescent.” Tony said, coming to lie down on the asphalt next to Steve.
> 
> They both stayed like that for a while, lying in their backs on top of the tower, arms behind their heads, listening to the city below them and watching the moon and the clouds.
> 
> Steve, still looking up at the sky, said, “You could see the stars, everynight, I used to go to the roof of the old apartment block and look at the stars. One year, Bucky got me this book about constellations and space for my birthday. In the war, all of us used to make up names for made up constellations. And now…”
> 
> Tony turned to look at him, wondering, thinking.
> 
> The next morning, Steve found 2 tickets for The Hayden Planetarium next to The Book of Constellations.

He was glad, for the first time he could think of, that he couldn’t see the stars, because then, his mind would be flooded with memories with Tony in planetariums, with Bucky, outside tents in Eastern Europe, with both of them, under mountains of blankets with Neil deGrasse Tyson documentaries and space operas playing in the background, because he could not be distracted on this mission. Not this one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hoped you liked it!!
> 
> any comments and kudos are incredibly appreciated!!
> 
> come say hi on [tumblr!](https://nohalfway.tumblr.com)
> 
> (nohalfway.tumblr.com)

**Author's Note:**

> there's more to come....
> 
> please tell me if you enjoyed!!
> 
> come say hi on [tumblr](https://nohalfway.tumblr.com)
> 
> -s
> 
> (updates might be a little slow, creative writing/any creative outlets are a huge vice for me (that and cafffine) so i refuse to let this stress me out. and please understand that this comes incredibly secondary to my school work/e.cs)


End file.
